Recording of the Week, Shadows of My Ancestors from Behzod Abduraimov

It has been three years since Uzbek pianist Behzod Abduraimov's stunning debut album on Alpha Classics, but it has certainly been worth the extended wait for this follow-up, which kicks off with Prokofieff's arrangement for solo piano of ten movements from his ballet, Romeo and Juliet. What is most striking throughout Abduraimov's performance is the extraordinarily varied range of colours that he elicits from his instrument: in movements such as Young Juliet, for instance, he is able to move from the crisp precision of the opening moments to a beautiful, dreamy tone for the more placid section.

This contrast is also evident in the best-known part of the ballet, Montagues and Capulets, where the heft and weight of the initial material gives way to a beguiling, mysterious account of the central Moderato tranquillo passage, played noticeably slower than Prokofieff's metronome marking but all the more convincing as a result in the way that it affords Abduraimov the opportunity to create the most enigmatically alluring sound. Aside from this, what impresses me about Abduraimov's playing is the respect he has for the printed dynamics. Quite often the two hands will have different markings, with perhaps one hand piano whilst the other is meant to be mezzo forte, and Abduraimov takes care to observe them all scrupulously. This mastery over both dynamics and tone makes for an incredibly evocative performance.

These qualities are present throughout all three works on the album, not least in Abduraimov's account of Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit. For various reasons, this regularly crops up on lists of the most difficult piano pieces in the repertoire, and with good reason: Ravel once remarked to a friend that his intention was to write something more difficult even than Balakirev's notoriously fiendish Islamey, and indeed no less an esteemed pianist than Marc-André Hamelin once described the opening as a "horrifying page" of music. From the technical dexterity required for the multiplicity of repeated notes in the third movement, Scarbo, to the discipline needed to balance the complicated textures of Le Gibet, and finally with the pinpoint precision demanded to achieve the delicate sounds of flowing water in Ondine, it's a beast of a work with nowhere to hide. As in the Prokofieff, Abduraimov's control here is magnificent, bringing out the left-hand melody in Ondine without ever disturbing the right-hand demisemiquavers or making them feel lumpy, and his command over the voicing of chords in Le Gibet is magical.

The heart of the album is a piece by an Uzbek composer who I must admit was new to me: Dilorom Saidaminova, and her work from 1973, The Walls of Ancient Bukhara. It is fitting that Abduraimov should choose this composition by his compatriot, as it was written as an homage to Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, which Abduraimov recorded for his aforementioned debut on Alpha. The booklet notes describe the piece as offering "a depiction in sound of the historic centre of the Asian city founded four or five centuries before our era", and it is a wonderfully pictorial work, with its eight short movements full of allusions to the chants of the Kalon mosque and passages illustrating nomadic tribes of riders or drawings of dancers on ancient walls.

Again Abduraimov is given ample chance to showcase his versatility, conjuring diverse moods from the menacing ferocity of The Minaret of Death, to the shimmering sounds of Stars over Bukhara and the inscrutable nobility of The Tomb of Ismail Samani. It's a marvellous work that sits perfectly between its two counterparts, a testament to the thoughtfulness and intelligence of Abduraimov's programming as well as the virtuosity of his performance.